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1. First, let’s open up Firefox’s profile manager.

If you are in windows, cd to the directory that contains the firefox.exe executable. For me, it’s cd C:\Program Files\Mozilla Firefox\.

If you’re on a *nix (including OSX, I assume), you should already have Firefox in your path.

Then run

This will bring up the Profile Manager, which is a window with a list of your different profiles. If you just installed firefox, you probably only have one profile, called default.

2. Create a Developer profile.

Click the button that says Create Profile, and when a window comes up click Next. In the next screen type Develop. Then, click Finish.

3. Rename your default profile to Browse.

Now, you should be back at the Profile Manager. Select the default profile, and click Rename Profile. Type in Browse, and click OK.

You should now have two profiles: Browse and Develop. To start Firefox with either of these, you can double click on the one you want.

Or, you can use Firefox’s -p switch to specify which profile you want to start with. We’ll use this in the next step.

4. Set up an icon on your desktop for each profile.

Make the shortcut execute firefox -p Browse for the browsing one, and firefox -p Develop for the developing profile.

If you are on Windows, you want to make 2 shortcuts to "C:\Program Files\Mozilla Firefox\firefox.exe" (or whatever the path to your Firefox executable is). Then, right click on the shortcuts, select Properties and add -p Browse the Target field of one, and -p Develop to the other. So, your target fields should look something like "C:\Program Files\Mozilla Firefox\firefox.exe" -p Browse

Don’t forget to name the two icons differently, or give them different icons.

5. Enjoy.

Now, you should have two shortcuts set up on your desktop. Now, when you add a developer’s extension to your Develop profile, you don’t have to worry about it slowing down your browsing. So stock up!

IMPORTANT NOTE:
You can’t (that I know of) use both profiles at once. This means that if you are running firefox with the Develop profile and you double click on your desktop icon for the Browse profile, a new Firefox window will open up, but it will still use your Develop profile. If you know a way around this, please let me know!